TEST HATCH SPECIAL
FROM THE BLEAK HILLTOP PASSES OF THE NORTH Pennines, via the pockmarked, nip-and-tuck tarmac ‘stages’ of mid Wales, to the familiar – but no less revealing – Bedfordshire lanes near evo HQ, in 2021 we have done everything we can to sift through the current crop of hot hatchbacks in pursuit of a winner. We’ve driven them collectively thousands of miles, we’ve argued at length about them, and we’ve enjoyed driving them and debating their relative merits more than with almost any other class of performance car this year. There have been disappointments; there have been revelations; troublingly a few have left us cold, but there is one, overarching thing we can all agree on: the cars you see here are the ones we genuinely believe to be the finest on sale at this moment in time.
So, how do you approach the current hot hatch market? I think we all have our own idea of what a hot hatch should be, informed by our age and the cars we grew up with, our thoughts on what constitutes value for money, how highly we rate outright performance compared with driver feedback, and so on. For some the paragon will always be a 205 GTI, for others a Mégane RS, or perhaps a Golf GTI of some description. Big, small, fast, slow, raw, refined – it’s a broad church, certainly.
So we decided to break things down into three separate tests, loosely termed ‘the small ones’ (evo 289), ‘the everyday ones’ (evo 290), and the ‘expensive, high-powered ones’ (evo 288). No, not necessarily the most catchy of working titles, but we had to draw the lines somewhere, and in the absence of obvious demarcation zones we decided to mark out our own.
The small ones meant the ubiquitous Ford Fiesta ST and its new rival, the Hyundai i20 N, but we also put the Toyota GR Yaris in there simply because it’s… small. Or smaller. The high-end group comprised the Honda Civic Type R, the Mercedes-AMG A45 S and the VW Golf R Performance Pack: three very different cars, but whether on price, power or singleness of purpose, these
